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14 May 2012

A Last Lexia

For various reasons, I've decided it's a good time to end my Strange Horizons column, Lexias. It began (untitled) on 7 February 2005, which means I've been writing it for more than seven years. I'm proud of the work that is there, and I don't want to dilute it or just keep repeating myself, so I've decided to switch things up a bit and move on to other projects (including occasional reviews for Strange Horizons; in fact, I was just trying to finish a new one when I checked to see if the column had been posted yet).

Looking back through the archives to see if I could find any special inspiration for a final column, something to return to or something to reiterate, I found various sentences and ideas I wished I could draw more attention to. And then the concept for the final column hit me — basically, to do what I did with my Weird Fiction Review collage, "Stories in the Key of Strange", but this time to pull material only from past columns, and to try to draw from as many as I possibly could without falling completely into meaninglessness.

The entire staff of Strange Horizons has been an absolute joy to work with, and I'm grateful to them and the readership for giving me such a great home for seven-plus years. I owe special thanks, though, to two people: columns editor Rebecca Cross, who has done a great job of gently keeping me from drifting entirely into incoherence; and this last column's dedicatee: Susan Marie Groppi, who first asked me to write the column, and who has always been such a sympathetic reader for it. Without her, truly, none of it would have existed.